DESCRIPTION

mser computes
the Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER)mser
reads an image file (in PGM format), computes the MSERs, and writes
them to a file of region seeds. Alternatively, the --frames
option can be used to compute elliptical frames instead of region
seeds. It is also possible to use --frames and
--seeds in combination to save both seeds and frames.

A
region seed is and index pointing to one of the image
pixels (pixels are enumerated in row major order, with 0
corresponding to the upper-left corner of the image). An MSER
containing a given seed is the largest connect subset of pixels
whose value is not smaller than the seed value.

A frame is an
ellipse approximating an MSER and is specified by 5 floating point
numbers: coordinate of the center x and y, and
elements S11, S12, S22 of the co-variance
matrix.

Both seeds and frames
can be saved either in ascii or binary format, based on the
specified FILESPECs (see also vlfeat(7)):
Ascii format

Each seed is a decimal number, one per
line of text, and each frame is a list of 6 floating point numbers,
one per line of text.

Binary format

The binary format is similar to the
ascii format, except that each seed is stored as a unsigned integer
(four bytes) and each frame component is stored as an IEEE double
(eight bytes). The data is written in little endian order.

mser can process
multiple images. In this case the names of the corresponding output
files are calculated based on FILESPECs.

EXAMPLES

mser test.pgm -d 5

Computes the MSERs of image
test.pgm setting the parameter delta to 5 and save
the result as a sequence of region seeds to test.mser.

mser test.pgm −−frames

Computes the MSERs of image
test.pgm, fits elliptical frames to them and saves the
frames to test.frame.

mser test.pgm
−−frames=bin:///tmp/%.frame −−seeds

Computes the MSERs of image
test.pgm, fits elliptical frames to them and saves the
frames to /tmp/test.frame and the region seeds to
test.mser.